Context Free

2005-05-25

Context Free 1.0 is out!

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Holiday Baking Round Up

2005-01-02

We baked a whole lot this holiday season. Here's what we made:

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Reverse VNC for Mac OS X

2004-10-29

I've implemented the "reverse connect" features for the Mac OS X VNC server and client programs. If you don't know what VNC is, go read about it here, then come back here if you use Mac OS X.

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Not Just Me

2004-09-28

Guess I'm not the only one who thinks that software patents are broken and harmful to innovation.

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Software Patents are Broken

2004-09-16

If there has ever been evidence that software patents, at least as practiced in the United States, are broken, this is it: Today, the US Patent Office published Microsoft's patent application 0040181571:

Reducing unwanted and unsolicited electronic messages by preventing connection hijacking and domain spoofing

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Periodic Table of the Operators

2004-05-28

Awhile back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it...

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Parsing, Programming and Protocols

2004-05-11

Someone on the Antlr mailing list was trying to parse IMAP responses with a grammar. During that discussion, this insight on programming languages vs. protocols occurred to me:

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We found the orange

2004-05-11

Kyle and I found a plastic orange from his play food set. It had been missing for some time. We were cleaning up some cardboard boxes and there it was! Kyle excitedly picked up and said "An orange! It is food!". He looked at it, then at me, and said "It's made of pretend."

Mac OS X Custom Dates Gone Bad...

2004-05-07

Seems John Gruber over at Daring Fireball had a bizarre problem with his Energy Saver Prefs Panel that he traced to a custom date format setting. here is my own similar tale:

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Global Wow

2004-03-10

It is possible to get obscure products from far away places quickly and easily!

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Extreme Cooking?

2004-02-08

Subject: Extreme cooking

I saw this subject in a mailing list and got all excited: Pair cooking? Two cooks, one with the whisk and wooden spoon, the other with a tasting finger? A set of food requirement stories to manage and guide the cooking? And what would refactoring a meal mean?

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SPF + Postfix Stats Script

2004-01-30

Of interest to system administrators of Postfix based mail sites:

If you're protecting your mail from spam using SPF, here's a script for generating statistics. If you're not, check out SPF.

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XML Misconceptions

2004-01-22

I'm involved in a standards project that has a small BNF syntax for representing its data in a simple textual form. Recently, it was suggested that we switch to an XML based format. I could not believe the storm that hit the project's mailing list.

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Spirex Release

2004-01-14

John and I spent much of the winter holiday working on his screen saver Spirex. He improved it in a myriad of little ways and I ported it to Mac OS X.

If mesmerizing swirly 2D and 3D images are your thing, then this screen saver is for you. Our two year old loves it!

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Setting the Dessert on Fire... Twice

2003-12-25

We had friends over for a Christmas/Chanukah dinner: John made a wonderful baked ziti, and we had Roman carrots and salad. After eating too much, it was then time for dessert. I made a farina pie (my great aunt Anna's recipe) and a jam tart for the kids. Our friends brought an apple crisp and ice cream.

The apple crisp was just done baking and it was suggested that we put it under the broiler to brown...

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Lighting the Menorah

2003-12-24

Yesterday evening we went to our friends' house to light the menorah for Chanukah. This was the first time for both Kyle and John. When we lit the candles, Rachael (Kyle's 2 year old friend) was very excited and Kyle kept pointing out the colors of the candles.

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Decorating the Tree

2003-12-22

Today we decorated the tree. Kyle was amazed and awed by John putting the lights on. He was so happy just to look at all the colors. Kyle and I unpacked the ornaments and he was fascinated with all of them. So fascinated, he didn't want to put them on the tree!

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